Audio installation
Variable dimensions
2015
Richard Humann in his Brooklyn art studio • 2015
In Transporter, Richard Humann explores how technology can collapse geographical distance and make one place perceptibly present within another. From June through August 2015, an omnidirectional microphone installed in Humann’s Brooklyn art studio captured the sounds of work, daily life, and the surrounding street. Operating twenty-four hours a day, the microphone transmitted this continuous acoustic environment to an online radio station, which broadcast the sound live to the Finlayson Art Area in Tampere, Finland. There, a parabolic speaker relayed the transmission into the exhibition space.
The conceptual focus of Transporter lies in the relationship between physical location and mediated presence. Although Brooklyn and Tampere are separated by thousands of miles, the live transmission connected them through the immediate experience of sound. Visitors in Finland could hear the activity of a working studio as it unfolded, encountering the rhythms of a place they could not see or physically enter. Technology became a means of transporting not an object or image, but the ambient reality of one location into another.
The continuous broadcast also challenged the distinction between private and public space. The studio was a place of artistic production and everyday life, ordinarily accessible only to those who entered it. By transmitting its sounds around the clock, Humann extended this intimate environment beyond its physical boundaries. Ordinary activities and incidental street noise became publicly accessible, transforming the unremarkable sounds of daily existence into the substance of the artwork. The artist did not compose a soundtrack or direct a performance; he created a system through which life in one location could be experienced elsewhere.
Sound is central to this exchange because it conveys a sense of presence without providing a complete picture of its source. Listeners hear evidence of activity but must imagine the people, objects, and surroundings that produce it. The transmission establishes a connection while preserving the distance between the two locations. Brooklyn remains Brooklyn, and Tampere remains Tampere, yet the sound creates an overlap between them.
The title, Transporter, refers to the technological process that carries sound across geographical boundaries, while also suggesting the transfer of experience from one environment to another. Humann uses a simple act of transmission to examine how communication technologies reshape our understanding of proximity, access, and presence. The work proposes that being connected to a place does not necessarily mean being physically there; sometimes, the experience of hearing can establish a powerful sense of elsewhere within the space we occupy.
Photo credit: Richard Humann Studio